Asia & Australia’s Engagement with Asia – Secondary

The Asia and Australia’s Engagement with Asia priority provides a regional context for learning in all areas of the curriculum. It reflects Australia’s extensive engagement with Asia in social, cultural, political and economic spheres.

Sophie hates being stereotyped because she’s Lebanese. When New Guy, Shehadie Goldsmith, is alienated at her Lebanese school because his dad’s Australian, she hates the way it makes her feel. Like she’s just as prejudiced as everyone else. Like she could make a difference if she stopped pretending she’s invisible. Like the attraction between them might be too strong to fight… But hate is such a strong word… Can Sophie find the strength to speak out – even if it means going against everything she’s been brought up to believe?

Seventeen-year-old Ameera has just finished school and her friendship with tariq, her best friend’s older brother, is growing. But when her father hears of it he sends Ameera to stay with his family in Kashmir and attend her cousin Jamila’s wedding. Only when she gets there does she discover the devastating truth – the intended marriage is not Jamila’s but her own! Will Ameera be trapped forever, or can she find strength beyond her years to escape from Pakistan and win back her freedom?

Razaq Nadeem lives in the tribal area of Kala Dhaka, known as Black Mountain, in Pakistan. When an earthquake strikes the area, and his family is lost, Razaq is told by his dying father to flee to Rawalpindi, where his uncle Kamil lives. In the aftermath of the quake, all is chaos, danger is around every corner. Razaq is sold into slavery by a man preying on orphans in the area, and desperate to escape the virtual imprisonment of washing dishes in a teashop for no wages, he heads for the streets, only to be betrayed and returned. A way out is offered by a social worker, but only after a hair-raising escape.

Zeba’s quiet life is shattered when her husband, Kamal, is found brutally murdered in the courtyard of their home. Nearly catatonic with shock, Zeba is unable to account for her whereabouts at the time of his death. Barely escaping a vengeful mob, Zeba is arrested and jailed. Awaiting trial, she meets a group of women, Nafisa, Latifa, and Mezhgan, whose own misfortunes have led them to these bleak cells. For these women, the prison is both a haven and a punishment, and there they form an indelible sisterhood. Is Zeba a cold-blooded killer, her cellmates wonder, or has she been imprisoned, like them, for breaking some social rule? Has she truly inherited her mother’s powers of jadu-witchcraft-which can bend fate to her will? Can she save herself? Or them?

Mahmoud’s passion for his wife, Fereiba, a schoolteacher, is greater than any love she’s ever known. But their happy, middle-class world implodes when their country is engulfed in war and the Taliban rises to power. When Mahmoud becomes a target of the new fundamentalist regime and is murdered, Fereiba is forced to flee Kabul with their three children. Finding a way to her reach her sister’s family in England is her one hope to survive. With forged papers and help from kind strangers they meet along the way, Fereiba manages to smuggle the children as far as Greece. But in a busy market square, their fate takes a frightening turn when her teenage son, Saleem, becomes separated from the rest of the family.

While the world of political Islam continues to be dominated by acts of violence and a separatist agenda, there are signs of reform in the Arab Spring movement. Ayaan Hirsi Ali who has been at the forefront of the reform movement offers an analysis of what’s happening and how it could happen faster.

Abdi’s world fell apart when he was only fifteen and Somalia’s vicious civil war hit Mogadishu. Unable to find his family and effectively an orphan, he fled with some sixty others,heading to Kenya. On the way, death squads hunted them and they daily faced violence, danger and starvation. After almost four months, they arrived in at refugee camps in Kenya – of the group he’d set out with, only five had survived.

A daughter of Cambodia remembers.Until age five, Loung Ung lived in Phnom Penh, one of seven children of an educated, high-ranking government official. When the Kymer Rouge stormed the city in 1975, the young girl and her family fled from village to village. Fighting to hide their identity, the Ungs eventually were forced to separate to survive. Loung was trained as a child soldier in a work camp for orphans. As half her family died in labour camps by execution, starvation, and disease, Loung herself grew increasingly resilient and determined – armed with indomitable will, she miraculously managed to outlast the Khmer Rouge and survive the killing fields.

When the challenge is to save not just yourself but an entire community, the stakes are high. Thrown hard on the bottom boards, I stared up at distorted mouths, faces so red I could feel their heat. They stank of rage and of something else; several frothed at the mouth; their howls drowned the clatter and shriek of gulls swerving and tilting above the mast. Banishment is the cruelest punishment, and Selene is being driven out unjustly by her own people.

What do you do when you meet a tohunga makutu? You run. When reality dissolves and myths and legends come alive? You run faster. And when the dead come to life and blood debts have to be paid, will you have the courage to do what must be done? Matiu Douglas has a bone tiki he stole from a tangi. His father’s important new client wants it. Badly. And he has some very nasty friends.

When Puarata, a tohunga makutu or black magician, seeks to capture and manipulate the soul of Wiri, a young warrior, he fails to account for a threat that will come many years later, when a boy is born who combines the strengths of two ancient mythologies – Maori and Celtic.

The history of the Vietnam War, from Vietnam’s struggle for independence from the French to the protracted peace process which bought the conflict with the USA to an end. Contains details about the guerrilla nature in which fighting was conducted, major offensives, and the daily life of a soldier.

An intense and emotive memoir of one girl’s difficult family upbringing in a Singaporean Chinese family during the Second World War. Lucy Lum was the third of seven children, born in Singapore in 1933 into a Chinese immigrant family ruled with an iron hand by Popo, her fearsome and superstitious grandmother. This is Singapore in the forties, a former British colony now living under the spectre of the invading Japanese – the hungry worms crawling down from the north as Lucy knows them – and fear floods the streets outside the family home.

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